Eighth Circuit Wrongly Struck Down Missouri’s Gun Sanctuary Law—But Also Created a Roadmap for How Such Laws Can Escape Invalidation in the Future
As co-blogger Jonathan Adler notes, on Monday the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, upheld a trial court decision striking down Missouri’s Second Amendment Preservation Act (SAPA), the state’s “gun sanctuary” law. I think the court got the decision wrong. But, in the process, it also essentially laid out a road map by which SAPA and other similar laws could survive judicial scrutiny with only cosmetic changes.
SAPA, like other gun sanctuary laws, bars state and local officials from helping to enforce various federal gun regulations that the state considers to be unconstitutional violations of the Second Amendment. Like the district court, the Eighth Circuit ruling recognizes that “Missouri may lawfully withhold its assistance from federal law enforcement.” A long line of Supreme Court decisions has held that the federal government may not “commandeer” state and local governments into helping enforce federal law. In part on that basis, numerous federal court decisions struck down Trump Administration efforts to force liberal sanctuary cities and states to help enforce federal immigration law. Conservative gun sanctuary laws are an imitation of liberal immigration sanctuaries, albeit advancing a right-wing cause rather than a left-wing one.
Nonetheless, the Eighth Circuit struck down SAPA because the state statute says that the federal laws it targets are “invalid.” While the state can refuse to help federal law enforcement, that “does not mean that the State may do so by purporting to
invalidate federal law.”
This reasoning strikes me as wrong. All SAPA actually does is deny state assistance to federal efforts to enforce certain gun laws. I went over this point in detail in my analysis of the district court ruling. The law does not impede the federal government’s own law enforcement efforts. The fact that the state’s motive for denying assistance is a belief that the federal laws in question violate the Second Amendment and are therefore “invalid” should be immaterial.
There are situations where an otherwise permissible state law becomes unconstitutional due to illicit motivations (e.g.—if the law is motivated by racial or ethnic discrimination). But a belief that a given federal law is unconstitutional isn’t one of them. That’s true even if the state legislature is wrong to think the laws in question violate the Second Amendment. Even if these federal laws are perfectly constitutional, the state still has the constitutional authori
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